This blog used to be called EDL Extra. I was a supporter (neither a member nor a leader) of the EDL until 2012. This blog has retained the old web address.****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

George Walden's Anti-Elitist Elite

Walden joined the Foreign Office in 1962
and worked there as a researcher until 1965 when he went to Hong Kong to study
Chinese. As a politician, he was elected
as the MP for Buckingham at the 1983 general election. He was Parliamentary
Private Secretary to the then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Sir
Keith Joseph, 1984–85 and Minister for Higher Education 1985–1987. He was
re-elected in 1987 and 1992 and retired from parliament at the 1997 general
election. He is now a journalist and writer.

New Elites received many favourable reviews, including the following one from
Noel Malcolm (writing for the Sunday
Telegraph):

“Walden has a fine eye for stupidities, and
a very sharp pen… his book presents a brilliant analysis of the ‘inverted
snobbery’ of the new elite, showing how our new masters, many of them from
upper-middle-class backgrounds, affect to despise the very class to which they
belong.”

The
Revolution Has Been Won – But It Lives On

George Walden

The anti-elitist revolution began in the
early 1960s – perhaps even before. That was around 50 – yes, 50! - years ago. “Since
that time, the sixties revolt has taken the path of all revolutions: it has
grown old and fixed in its ways.” And like all revolutionary leaders, the
“spiritual descendants [of the 1960s revolts] have become narrow-minded, intolerant
authoritarians themselves in their pursuit of populist dogma”. What’s more, the
“circle has turned and a new conformism is in danger of replacing the old”.

Now anti-elitism “is constraining, a
secular religion with its dogmas, its clergy, its cloudy hermeneutics”. However, like most revolutionaries, these anti-elitists believe in permanent
revolution. They believe that revolution must go on lest the evil forces of
reaction return. Yet the “truth is that the anti-elitist’s fox has long been
shot”. More disturbingly,

“In the calls for vigilance against elitist
thinking there are faint echoes of regimes where the revolution is never safe
till every enemy, real or imaginary, has been liquidated.”

The revolution and the revolutionaries have
thus become self-serving.

What the hell are these revolutionaries
fighting against anyway? After all, “the average citizen can hardly be said to
be in thrall to outmoded canons of taste and behaviour handed down from above”.
Thus the more populist the elites are, and the less ‘traditional elitism’ there
is, the “more insistent the campaign against them and their supposed values
becomes”.

George Walden’s primary concern is with
what may be called the Left-Liberal elite. The Left-liberal ‘revolutionaries’
are non-violent because they don’t need a violent revolution or to agitate on
the streets. But of course it’s the Far Left, or the Revolutionary Left, who
are the most supposedly anti-elitist of all. As per usual, the Rad Left is
thoroughly middle class – indeed often upper-middle-class. Walden tells us how
Robert Michels, the German sociologist, realised

“'how few genuine workers attended trade
union meetings, how the leaders of the Left were almost invariably educated men
and women from the middle or upper classes, and that it was their will and interests,
rather than those of the working class, that tended to prevail.’”

The fact is that many Leftists and
Left-Liberals - yes, the Establishment - have always hated the working class.
That’s why they wanted to change its members, or treat them condescendingly, or
lead them to a revolution. Even – even? -Marxist revolutionaries hated 'the masses’. As Walden says of Lenin, he
“described them [the masses] as ‘slumbering, inert, hidebound and dormant’”.

The revolutionaries then became the
Establishment – or at least a large and fixed part of it. Now, “[f]or the first
time in Western democratic history society is dominated by an elite of
anti-elitists”.

These people are anti-elitists. But they
are still an/the elite. They have an elite position largely bought by an elite
education. Now they are trying to deny all that is elite to everyone else. They
learn about English history, literature, grammar, etc. and then say that the
rest of us don’t need such things (in our glorious comprehensive schools). They
learn the classics yet the rest us are expected to do ‘media studies’ and study
Coldplay or EastEnders when, in actual fact, most kids know more about all this
stuff than their teachers.

The right-on elite are keeping the plebs in
their place. No matter how good their mockney accents are, or how frequent their
references to popular culture, it’s still they who have most of the power and
control. The fact that they are left-liberals (sometimes with estuary English
accents), or sometimes outright Leftists,
doesn’t stop it being a fact that they have the power and the control. It
doesn’t stop it being a fact that they are dumbing the rest of us down in order
to build themselves up. In order to allow them to continue being the supreme condescenders
that they are.

Examples
of the Elite

George Walden gets very specific about how
elite the anti-elite sometimes – or oftentimes - is. He recalls a particular
dinner he once attended at which the subject of conversation was, of all
things, elitism.

He recalls, particularly, one woman thus: “‘Elitism’,
the woman rapped out over dinner, ‘is a bad word.’” Yet “[t]he woman’s pronunciamento seemed at variance with
her persona. She was expensively dressed, self-assured, a figure of authority [and]
the observation seemed to conflict with her surroundings: the dinner was in an
expensive club”.

Then the conversation became deeper. Walden
himself mentioned Mathew Arnold’s famous phrase about ‘the best that is known
and thought in the world’. The aforesaid posh woman took offence to this. She said:

“‘Best?
It depends what you mean.’”

To which Walden replied:

“‘Well, something that’s better than
anything else.’

“‘Who’s to say?’

“‘Well, someone has to say…’

“‘You mean some people are intrinsically
superior to others?

“‘That’s not what I said…’”

The Elite against Elitism

What’s wrong with elite tastes and elite
things if everyone, at least in principle, has access to them?Or, as George Walden puts it, “we [have] reach[ed]
the position where there is only one thing more reprehensible than having elite
tastes, and that is trying to spread them, so as to make them less elite”. The
problem with elite things is surely that they were out of the reach of many
people. Nonetheless, art galleries aren’t out of reach. Radio 3 isn’t out of
reach. Public libraries aren’t out of reach. Sure, many operas and theatre
performances are out of reach; but things can still be done to stop that. Nevertheless,
these anti-elitist elites are against things being out of reach of ‘the masses’, they are against these elite
things themselves. Or, more correctly, they are against them now that they have
learned about them or consumed them. That means that elite things are ‘too
elite’ for the rest of us.

Thus these prize condescenders of the
working class, the elite of anti-elitists, push their views about elitism on
the rest of us and in the process their anti-elitism becomes “a recipe for the
propagation of ignorance amongst the many". All this means that it’s not
the people who are crying out against all things elite and elitist, but the
(anti-elitist) elite itself. As Walden puts it, the “most striking aspect of
anti-elitism as a social and cultural doctrine in Britain is that it is
propagated not from below, but largely from above”.

The bottom line, then, is that the elite
are protecting their own elite position – just as they’ve always done! These
anti-elitist elites “appear to be more concerned with looking down in
compassion than with enabling the objects of our pity to look up in hope”. They are denying the rest of us ‘the best that is known and thought in the
world’ and keeping it for themselves. Instead we get ‘media studies’, more ‘light
entertainment’, and the dumbing down of whatever else it is the anti-elitist elite
thinks should be dumbed down.

The
Elite's Fake Populism

Nick Clegg at his old school - Westminster.

In order to dumb down, or become populist,
the elite has to pretend they it’s not in fact elite. Walden’s general argument
is that in the old days the elite didn’t pretend – it was honest about its
elitism on the whole (without always using the word ‘elite’ of course). Now the
elite “take on the characteristics of their surroundings, chameleon-like”. You know, like Tony Blair with his estuary English and him pretending that he
watched a football match which actually occurred before he was born. Or David
Cameron “pedalling to the House of Commons followed by a chauffeur-driven Lexus
carrying a clean shirt and shoes, like some bicycling Bertie Wooster with his
Jeeves in motorised attendance “. Or Blair, again, choosing only three classical
pieces and Cameroon none on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Or even the public
school boy Guy Richards pretending to be a Cockney Geezer.

However, another of Walden’s arguments is
that it’s no always a pretence. These elites may be elite in terms of power and
privilege; but they can be quite genuinely ‘common’ or ‘popular’ too. After
all, at many public schools the up-coming elites are trained in populism and
how to hoodwink the plebs. Many people who’ve never even been in sniffing
distance of a private school have some quaint illusions about them.In actual fact, many public school teachers
are training the up-coming elite to be Average Blokes just like Cameron and
Blair. That is:

“ Contrary to the image of public schoolboys
grubbing away at dead languages, a mere 3 per cent of sixth formers at
independent schools study the classics, and a large proportion of classics
graduates go into financial services."

I’m not arguing against public schools as
such. I’m arguing against the posh boys’ fakery and their dumbing down for
power, money and to keep the rest of us away from an education that has done
them so well - thank you!